Category Archives: Hobbies

If you are expecting a big exposé on the administration, I’m sorry to disappoint you, I don’t really know much about whether Putin was instrumental in electing the new Prez, or if glasnost has been replaced by Chernobyl packets, but what I do know is that there are a lot of people with .ru domains that have nothing better to do than to send mountains of spam comments to this very blog.

A flood of these comments, numbering into the dozens per day, have been appearing and require manual filtering, which is time consuming and annoying, to say the least. A quick Google search on this topic assures me that I am not the lone victim, but rather this is a problem that pervades blog admins more or less universally. And yes, there are effective countermeasures that minimize the annoyance, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is an epidemic. You may ask, “What’s the purpose?” and as I understand it, many (some) amateur blogs allow un-moderated comments, which allows the bot or hacker to publish links on a bona-fide blog in the context of their meaningless crap, which point to product ads, porn sites, or entrapment sites, to name a few. Even moderated comments need careful editing to remove the embedded links, if they somehow actually get published. Keep reading for some actual examples….

UPDATE – Jan. 13, 2017 – It seems as if the team of Pebble developers and technical people that Fit-Bit hired through their acquisition of Pebble are quite positive regarding the future of the existing Pebble platform for at least the next year and possibly beyond. Rumors abound as to whether a future Fit-Bit hardware product will incorporate everyone’s favorite Pebble Watch features and functions, but it’s my opinion that they wouldn’t have spent the effort and money (rumored to be about $40 million) and hired a bunch of Pebble People if they were just going to let it die. Not much has been updated regarding warranty service or technical support, but there are some aggressive prices on left-over Pebbles on Amazon, so the real die-hards can just buy a relatively inexpensive replacement if their Pebble fails. I any event, it’s no longer the doom and gloom that was first reported and that I detailed in the original posting. Stay tuned!

UPDATE – Dec. 16, 2016 – Last night around 3 am my Pebble watch woke me with a series of vibrate alerts because it was undergoing an update to V 4.3, and this morning the Android App also updated to Version 4.3.0-1355-904fed2.

In light of the first announcement that all support operations would cease, this seems to be a small ray of hope in an otherwise dark tunnel. Perhaps it was due to the relatively passionate feedback that Fit-Bit received on their user support community blog from discouraged Pebble owners. I understand that acquisitions of this type can be complex and inordinately detailed regarding exactly what the new owners can claim rights to and what they can’t touch. Apparently, actual watch hardware is / was off limits to Fit-Bit as part of this deal. They acquired some of the Pebble brain trust and the intellectual property and the rights to all of the software and development shell.

Since I opened this blog, more than 200 attempts at unauthorized logins have been made.

Not just a quick drive-by either; concerted repeated attempts at hijacking the blog. Yup, there are people out there who have nothing better to do than to try and screw with other people’s stuff. I hope that this doesn’t come as a surprise to you.

My very first vehicle was a Vespa 90 that I bought from a school chum without my parents’ permission and triumphantly rode down the driveway back when the ink on my driver’s license was still wet. It got me back and forth to my job at the bicycle store, took me and my brother down to the pizzeria on Dodd Street to get a “za,” and provided a newfound freedom that let me explore a much larger circle of the world than my 10-speed did.

After that, I bought a Yamaha DT1-B, a very capable street legal Enduro, that I practically wore out as it took me to all those places I just had to go. I remember riding it to my new job at the VW dealer in mid-winter, bundled in my Passaic Leather Coat Company 7-layer police motorcycle jacket and knee high boots. My hands were so stiff when I got to work, I’d wrap them around a drop light to thaw them out before I could grab a wrench.

Later, after a short dalliance with a Yamaha 500cc twin that had a frame too small to ride two-up, I bought my first “big bike,” a red Yamaha XS750 Triple, with backrest and a factory fairing. Oh God, power, power, power! Many miles were gleefully covered, and it followed us on a trailer when we moved here to Arizona. It took us to Havasu, Grand Canyon, Montezuma’s Well and Castle, and many more weekend destinations. But, in 1986, I sold it because with a new job and a new house and bigger and more expensive responsibilities, I just didn’t have much time to ride.

In 2005, I met a guy who would become a great and long time friend. Don and I shared a love for motorcycles, and in 2008, he convinced me to fly up to Denver, rent a big Harley, and ride to Sturgis with him. I hadn’t ridden in over 20 years, and needless to say, I was nervous.

So many things that should be really simple take a little turn and thus complicate our lives in ways that then cost us resources, mental energy, and valuable time. Each, by themselves, may not amount to much, but in today’s complex, interconnected, busy world, they add up fast and raise the energy drain it takes to just stay even.

Of course, one could opt for getting off the grid entirely, or as close to that condition as possible, but the lure of technology and progress is one just too great for me to resist, so I accept, but as you can see, sometimes complain about its consequences.

There is , to me, a certain satisfaction in making old things work like new again. Although I know a few people who have performed near miracles restoring old cars, that has proven to be way out of my league. But nearly anyone with patience, a little time, and a strong interest can relive a little of the past by restoring or refurbishing some of their old favorite bicycles from their past. Since I started my mechanical career working in a bicycle store, I decided to resurrect a few of the old Schwinns that had been in storage for many years.

This is sort of an introductory article about my Schwinn hobby, but since it was published, so many more interesting bikes and I have crossed paths. Hence, I have devoted an entire page to bicycles and their refurbishment and restoration. If you are interested in more depth, just click HERE!

Or, if you would like to finish reading this shorter article, click “Continue Reading” just below.

This Is now Mostly “Old Hat.”

I have removed all the really old comments about my transition to Windows 10 when it was first offered to a small group of Beta testers, as all that news has gone completely stale. This article will only contain occasional updates regarding new builds, and then only if I experience a major new feature, addition, or crash.